April 29, 2016

[I was asked by Rødt!, the theoretical organ of the Red Party of Norway, to write a short piece for interested Norwegians who
trying to make sense of the US presidential elections. Given that who is
running the US is a matter of great concern for everyone in the world, it seems
like my internationalist duty to try. I completed it March 11, so it hasn't been completely falsified by more recent developments. I concluded my introduction to the article with this caveat:

Just one word of caution. We here are
also alternately amused and horrified and perplexed and given hope by what’s
been happening.]

How Do Bourgeois Democratic Elections in the US Work?

A decade and a half into the 21st century,
the answer is that they work badly. Very badly.

The
basic function of the government—what Marx called the general staff of the
capitalist class--in bourgeois democracies is to keep the ruling class on top
and the masses down, of course. To do this, it is preferable to convince the
people that their interests are being represented in the government than just
to crush them under then jackboot of the police and military. The government
also has to act as referee when the ruling class is divided on how to tackle
pressing issues. And it has to uphold the interests of the domestic capitalists
against those of the ruling classes in other countries.

The theory of the US government is based on the “balance of powers” between
different sections of the government. Every other year there are elections in every
state to choose the 435 members of the national House of Representatives (the
lower body of Congress) and one third of the 100 senators (who serve six year
terms). Every four years, the president is elected and can serve only two
terms. The nine justices on the Supreme Court are not elected and serve for
life. When one quits or dies, the president chooses a replacement who must be
approved by the Senate.

The President runs the state apparatus and the military, Congress sets
government policy by passing laws and the Supreme Court rules on whether laws
and government actions are legitimate according to the US Constitution.

There are a lot of obvious holes built into this structure. One is the
inequality between the fifty states in the Union. Each state gets two senators,
regardless of population, So urban, multi-racial and generally liberal California
has 2 senators for 38,000,000 people. The twenty-two smallest states, mostly
rural, combined have the same population--and 44 senators! Similarly, presidents
are not elected directly, but chosen by an Electoral College where each state
gets votes allocated according to the number of representatives and senators.
What that means is that if the races go narrowly for one party’s candidate in
enough states it can overcome big majorities for the other party in the other
states and a candidate will be elected without winning a majority or plurality
of the popular vote, as happened with George W. Bush in 2000.

There
are three other problems baked into what US schools teach children is Our Democratic
System: racism, money and the two party duopoly. Racism hardly needs comment.
The two first victims of European settlement

November 11, 2015

When the Second World War ended in mid-1945, the world was almost thrust into World War III. There was a section of the US ruling class and the military high command who weren't happy that the Soviet Union had played such a key role in defeating fascism and rolling up the Wehrmacht in Europe, that communists had led the underground resistance to German and Japanese occupation in country after country in Europe and Asia, and that around the world national liberation movements were vocally demanding independence and an end to colonial bondage. The ruling class and its military chiefs wanted to run the world, and they were ready to crush the pesky reds and foreigners who stood in the way.

They were stopped in their tracks.

It wasn't the Red Army of the Soviet Union that did it, or the fighters of the French maquis, or Mao Zedong's Eighth Route Army in China. It was US soldiers and sailors and other troops, who launched a mighty movement to be sent home. They had signed on to do a job, to stop the drive to fascist world domination by Hitler Germany and Italy and Japan, and they had helped do it.

The way they saw it, the job was done. But the brass was trying to keep the troops in Europe and Asia as an occupying army and a combat-ready invasion force. Unfortunately for them, many of the GIs were workers who had been involved in the giant wave of strikes that shook the US in the midst of the Great Depression in the late '30s. These disciplined collective struggles organized the mass production industries like auto, steel and rubber before the outbreak of war. The soldiers knew that back in the States, the winding down of the war had triggered a huge new strike wave which began in '44 and picked up steam in '45 to make up the ground lost during labor's no-strike pledge during the war.

The first to stand up were troops from the European Theater who had made it back to the US only to find that orders had been cut to send them to the West Coast where they were to take ship to Asia for occupation duty. On August 21, less than two weeks after VJ Day, 580 soldiers from the Army's 95th Division signed a protest telegram to the White House. The 97th Division hung banners from the trains taking them to California, proclaiming "We're Being Sold Down The River While Congress Vacations." On September 15, General Twaddle of the 95th, assembled his soldiers for orders on occupation duty. The Washington Post the next day reported "the boos from the soldiers were so prolonged and frequent that it took [General Twaddle] 40 minutes to deliver a 15 minute speech."

Families added their voices to the chorus. Congress was inundated with letters and telegrams, thousands every day, insisting that the troops come home and stay home. As fall turned to winter, some families sent baby booties to their congressmen, with a note which read "Be a good Santa Claus and release the fathers."

And the outcry rapidly spread to the troops overseas. Nelson Peery, a veteran revolutionary who was in a segregated Black unit in the Philippines in 1945, recalls (in his autobiographical Black Fire):

"Perhaps it will never be known who coined the slogan 'Home by Christmas!' It was a perfect piece of agitation. This simple, understandable slogan was in the immediate interest of the troops and at the same time hit at the core of the generals' hopes of attacking the Soviet Union...

"It was painted on the latrines. It was scratched on the directional posts at the crossroads. It appeared as if by magic in the recreation rooms and the mess halls. Sometimes it was even painted on the screened-in officers' quarters."

When Christmas Day came, graffiti was no longer enough-4,000 soldiers marched in formation to the 21st Replacement Depot in Manila behind banners saying "We Want Ships!" Their panicked commander said, "You men forget you're not working for General Motors. You're in the army." On Guam, mass meetings called a hunger strike.

Halfway round the world, thousands of soldiers marched down the Champs Elysee in Paris on January 8 to rally in front of the US Embassy and shout "Get us home!" The next day in occupied Germany in Frankfurt am Main, speakers at a soldiers' demonstration telegraphed a message to Congress that said only "Are the brass-hats to be permitted to build empires?"

With Christmas past, things in the Philippines got hotter. A 156 man Soldier's Committee was elected in Manila to speak for 139,000 soldiers there, "all interested in going home." It issued leaflets which declared, "The State Department wants the army to back up its imperialism." The Soldier's Committee elected an eight man central committee which included Emil Mazey, a UAW local president who had played a leading role in the battle to unionize auto in the late '30s.

Declaring that "the continued stay of these millions of GIs in the armed forces can only serve the predatory interests of Wall Street," the soldiers' leadership asked the powerful United Auto Workers to present their demands of Congress. The UAW did, further fueling the "Bring Us Home" movement stateside.

With rebellion in the ranks turning political, discipline eroding and no sympathy on the home front, the ruling class and the military blinked. Orders to the Pacific were revoked and more vessels, everything up to ocean liners, were pressed into service to get the restive veterans home and demobilized. It was all the generals could do to keep enough troops to maintain the occupation of the conquered Axis powers.

The invasion of Iraq may not last long enough to produce a wave of rebellion in the military like the Vietnam War did, but even if it doesn't, there's a lot we can learn from the soldiers who organized the post-WWII Troops Home movement, back in the day.

September 30, 2015

[I think I might have met Neal Gammill. Once. These moving memorial thoughts by my friend and comrade T. Shelton of Tennessee give some idea of how much I missed.]

photo credit: Whitney Wood

"Hey, you're with that Freedom Road group, right?"

Those were the first words Neal Gammill ever spoke to me. He
had walked right up to me at an anti-war event, and as I would come to know in his
true-to-form way asked the political question on his mind. Over the next 5 years
we shared countless hours talking politics, and doing politics--from trade unions, to community
campaigns, from police killings, to movement surveillance, to revolutionary
feminism, to the centrality of racism and methods for organizing working class
whites to destroy white supremacy. And internationalism. In fact, always
internationalism.

More than anyone else I know Neal always centered his
revolutionary internationalism and the struggle to destroy white-supremacist
imperialism headed-up by the USA. His internationalism and anti-imperialist
line was always with him and his beloved Éire (Ireland). These same lessons he
shared time and again on the picket, at the rally, at the prayer meeting, at
the public forum demanding self-determination and independence for occupied
Palestine. A mid-southerner, the application of these politics to his own home
was no different, always noting the imperialist root of US racism and seeing
the struggle against white supremacy and for Black liberation as central fronts
in our movement for real justice and freedom.

Neal could be counted on as a first responder to every
threatened and undertaken act of US aggression, from Libya to Iran, from
Egypt to Iraq, in Syria and Columbia. And Afghanistan. That was an imperial
project he had seen firsthand, had participated in while in the Air Force and one, he would confide, he felt he had never been meant to make it out of alive.
Like so many others, he did make it back from Afghanistan alive, but with those
scars on the soul that the US military gives to vets.

Neal's politics grew on anti-authoritarian and anti-fa roots.
Both as a working class white kid and in the military, he spent time in and
around the white power movement. As is true for too many, the allure of
whiteness and the ideas of Third Position politics were a quick mental exit
ramp towards some taste of power. But even then Neal was always

September 11, 2015

Last night I hit the 350.org OFF+ON Campaign roll-out event
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Well over fifteen hundred people showed
up to a program headlining Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben.

The catastrophic scale and gradual (though escalating) pace of global warming
and planetary climate change can make it, I think, perversely compelling for
many of us to ignore. It’s too vast, too unstoppable, to contemplate on a daily
basis, while even new weather patterns which affect us adversely, like scorching
summers, get: well, it’s the weather, what can ya do?

That’s why, though not a full-time climate activist myself,
I’ve made a point of trying to keep up with 350.org and their analysis and work
since I attended McKibben’s inaugural “Do The Math” show three years ago.

First the event itself. It amounted to a very effective and
sophisticated pep rally, with a four-person crew, Klein, McKibben, the “Hip Hop
Reverend” Lennox Yearwood and Cynthia Ong from the Borneo region of Malaysia, at
center stage. They passed the mike back and forth amongst themselves for
scripted stints of no more than a couple of minutes, with sharp visuals and a
few brief video messages projected on large screens behind them. There were three
brief cultural performances and some other speakers interspersed, notably a
quartet of young folk from various countries who were held to the same two-minute,
single-point messaging format. 350.org big May Boeve closed by
sketching out some battle plans for the coming months.

The Message

Here’s the message as I received it. (Your mileage may vary.
Watch it here if you are so inclined.)

Things are bad and getting worse. Though fossil fuel companies have reserves 5
times what can be extracted and burned without damaging the biosphere beyond
repair, they are still spending hundreds of billions every year in exploring
for more.

People’s resistance is growing globally and has won significant victories—the
“done deal” Keystone XL Pipeline of a few years ago hasn’t been built, for
instance.We are in a race between global warming and resistance, we aren’t winning yet, and
every day counts.The main enemy is the giant fossil fuel companies (Shell,
Exxon, India’s Adani Group, etc.), which must be “turned off” because the logic
of their continued existence is to worsen the problem. The main tactic promoted
here was divestment campaigns to drive down stock prices.The rapid growth of renewable energy, especially solar, and the falling price
of renewable generation means we can win this (The highpoint of the staging
savvy of the evening was the introduction of this point and of the turn toward
more optimism overall. It was a powerful and emotional performance of “Here
Comes The Sun” by a young 350.org activist named Antonique Smith)Renewables, and the changeover to them, can best be accomplished by taking them
up at a community level in conjunction with struggles against poverty and
injustice. We need “energy democracy” including insuring that the millions of new green
jobs created are decently paid union jobs.The enemy has much to lose, and the money to buy the politicians
it needs to stave off change. We must build a movement that builds on our
accomplishments so far and unites hundreds of millions who have much to gain.

A Few Observations

Attending such events answers some questions about what the
leading figures in 350.org are thinking and what they will be doing. The
emphasis on attacking the big fossil fuel corporations is a promising new
approach, though no claim is made that that successes in divestment campaigns so far,
while impressive, have made a qualitative difference. The success of
sanctions against apartheid was cited repeatedly, but the likes of Exxon are,
by comparison, hardened targets.Klein, McKibben and the others are clearly intent on baking into this movement
a central thrust of justice and equality, and an internationalist stance. This is,
of course, helped by the very global nature of the crisis. The symbolic message
of who was up on stage, and on screen, was part of this, obviously. Rev.
Yearwood wore a Sandy hat for Sandra Bland and name checked Black Lives Matter.
And while some of it just came of as earnest assertion, a strong case was made
that many of the initial victorious struggles thus far have emerged from
indigenous communities, poor and marginalized.

A schedule of big demonstrations pegged to international
events like the Paris Climate Summit this December will move things ahead along
on the path the group has been following. Ramping up divestment efforts will
not take out Big Oil and Big Coal. McKibben hinted at more civil disobedience,
but it’s not clear how that might be directed at, say, Shell or the Koch
Brothers.

Of course, things which weren’t said also deserve our
attention. For instance, McKibben did not mention the July 20 declaration by
noted climatologist James Hansen and fellow scientists that newly understood
feedback mechanisms may well mean a rise of ten feet in global sea level by
2065, which would be beyond catastrophic. Does 350.org disagree with Hansen? Or
feel that the news is so grim that it would upset the balance of the ON+OFF
dynamic embodied in the group’s new slogan?

More understandably, electoral politics and capitalism
itself were touched on only by implication. The refusal to address the upcoming
US presidential elections was. I think, wise, and reflects their understanding
that only a huge mass movement can produce the changes needed. Subsuming such a
movement in a presidential campaign would risk its continued existence once
next November has come and gone. (That said, Sanders kids were present in large numbers and leafleting the crowd.) As for a frontal attack on the capitalist
system itself, that’s not the job of the spokespeople for a broad and, one must
hope, growing united front. That’s our job, us being the Reds, the revolutionary
socialists in the movement.

Yo! Frankie!

But this does bring up the most interesting omission, an
issue my partner Dody asked me about straightaway when I was telling her about the
program: Pope Francis’s recent encyclical, Laudato Si’, which was
mentioned only in passing. Not only is this document the
most positive development in the Climate Justice movement so far this year, but
Bill McKibben himself wrote an impassioned and thoughtful appreciation of it
for the NY Review of Books, which she and I had read together.

The Pope challenges, more
directly that anything at the OFF+ON event, the “deification” of the market and
the money power. More, Francis identifies the biggest obstacle to uniting the
hundreds of millions needed to win this life and death battle. As McKibben
summarizes him:

Our
way of life literally doesn’t work. It’s breaking the planet. Given
the severity of the situation, Francis writes, “we can finally leave behind the
modern myth of unlimited material progress. A fragile world, entrusted by God
to human care, challenges us to devise intelligent ways of directing,
developing, and limiting our power.”

350.org
had an already convinced and ready-to-act audience at BAM. If such people are
judged unready to rethink and take on the way late capitalism operates, with
its television-reinforced culture of consumption über alles, and to change their lives accordingly, we really
are in deep shit.

July 2, 2015

This May I took it upon myself to attend two memorial
observances, the 45th anniversaries of the massacres at Kent State
and Jackson State.

On May 4, 1970, four students were gunned down by the Ohio National Guard at
Kent State University as part of a massive upsurge against the war and for
social change that was sweeping American campuses. Ten days later on May 14,
Mississippi state troopers and Jackson police opened fire on a student protest
at Jackson State, killing two young men, James Earl Green and Phillip Gibbs, in
a massive fusillade. These two shootings were critical points in the events of
May ’70, the most massive and militant nation-wide student strike this country
has ever seen. (I have written a series of pieces on May ’70, 19 of them and
counting.)

Here are a few reflections based on what I observed. Please
bear in mind that I had not been back to the battlefield at Kent since 1994, and
this was my first trip to Jackson State.

1. I am goddamn old. I was an adult, a young one, when this
shit happened, and that was going on half a century ago.

Nevertheless, like many who were around then, I am unlikely
to forget these killings before I check out.

2. Amidst numerous moving and inspiring moments, I want to
cite two that struck me particularly. The May 4 Visitors Center at
Kent State, one of the most important victories won there in the long struggle
against forgetting, has as its centerpiece a short film, 9 minutes perhaps,
with many photographs and sound recordings of the deadly moments around the
National Guard firing. I sat through it three times.If you are ever within, say, a three hour
drive, you should watch it.

At Jackson State, the then-president of the school, Dr. John
A. Peoples, described the aftermath of the shooting. He told how for the next
four years at every sporting event the school’s team played in, Jackson
students greeted the national anthem by standing silently with their fists in
the air, Tommie Smith & John Carlos-style. His pride was evident, as was
his quiet delight when he described sitting next to the governor of Mississippi
at one such game.

3. Kent is an amazing anomaly. For forty-five straight year
people have made hajj to the campus from across the country, joining with a
core of regulars associated with the university and the town of Kent to remember May 4, 1970. I
cannot think of anything comparable in the left movement in this country. In
New York there is an annual memorial for the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist
Fire. In Bay View, WI, now part of Milwaukee, the local labor movement
remembers the 1886 murder of seven strikers by National Guardsmen at a steel
mill. Both of these events are mainly local in character and both date in their
current form to the revival of labor militancy and interest in the working class
during the '60s and '70s.

Why is Kent so different? The most obvious thing is that it
was white college kids who were shot,
on their campus, by the National Guard. It stunned the country at the time, a
time when hundreds of thousands of us were on strike at our own campuses. This
was reinforced by the classic musical mnemonic, "Ohio" written by Neil Young
and pushed into immediate release by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in the
aftermath of the killings.

Further, the university administration did its best to
obliterate all memory of the killings. This led in 1977 to Tent City, erected
to block the construction of a gymnasium on the murder site, and to a decades-long
campaign of militant struggle rejecting further attempts to kill or to coopt
and dilute the memory.

Nowadays, May 4 is observed by several days of talks,
forums, and culture. One I attended was run by young members of Black United
Students, whose powerful panel and heartbreaking stories laid bare how little
has actually changed since their predecessors were organizing and protesting
racism and discrimination at Kent in 1970.

The heart of the observance is memorial rituals now enshrined
by time: a candlelight march as May 3 turns into May 4, this year numbering
335, followed by a vigil in which volunteers take rotating shifts holding candles at
the now-memorialized spots where the four fell. (I stood for Jeffrey Miller and
Sandy Scheuer at different points during the night). It culminates with an
emotional memorial program.

While folks come from around the country to take part, the
commemoration is centered on Kent people. In addition to nationally recognized
spokespeople like my old compa Alan Canfora and Tom Grace, there is a core of
people residing in Kent who do the invisible work that makes it happen. Here I
will single out as representative the folk I stayed with there, Mike Pacifico
and Kendra Hicks Pacifico, whose basement is a well-organized stash of decades
worth of banners, candles and other nuts and bolts of the protest. And the ongoing
student group, the May 4 Task Force, provides not just bodies but leadership.

The whole comprises what old hands call the Kent May 4
Family. And in multiple ways it is a family. First, relatives of the fallen
have been part of it from the start. Most of the parents, active from the start, are now
dead or are unable to attend. Laurel Krause, Alison’s sister, is always a
presence. So is Alan Canfora’s sister, Chick, another Kent alum. Beyond that,
family members of longtime participants who have been brought to Kent since
they were itty-bitties have now come on their own. And new regulars are
adopted, like Canadian photographer Christian Bobak who came to document the
anniversary five years ago and has returned every year since.

4. At Jackson State this year, a short memorial program was
followed by a panel with vigorous participation from veterans of May, 1970 in
the audience. Apparently, annual programs had fallen by the wayside in some
past years but with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement focused first and
foremost on police killings of young Black men, this year’s program had to
happen.

Where the observation at Kent State University was
overwhelmingly white, the 110 or so at Jackson State were at least that Black.
Participation was even older than at Kent. The two activists in their twenties
who drove me down from Memphis were among the youngest people there, save for a
few in strollers.

The formal program was attended by about blessedly short
given the outdoor heat and lack of shade. Bjorn, one of the Tennesseans I
traveled with, summed it up as highlighting students from 1970 who had gone on to
academic or professional success, and marked by frequent references to the
events of May 15 as “a tragedy.” Jackson’s new Chief of Police, a younger alum,
had to say he knows what people are thinking about police these days and why,
and pledged that there would be no such occurrences on his watch.

Maybe 50 people stayed for the forum after, and folks there were plenty clear.
What happened in May 15, 1970 was not “tragic," it was murder. Murder by the
police. It was fascinating to watch the veterans share their experiences and
try and pull together what they had seen into a larger, more coherent picture
of the deadly assault they had survived. Comparisons to the present murders of
young African-Americans were blunt and frequent. And I wish every white yahoo
who responds to police violence by going on about Black-on-Black violence could
have been there to listen to folks from the community grapple with the problem.

(Both halves of the program were livestreamed by
Jackson State; video can be viewed here.)

5. LONG LIVE THE SPIRIT OF KENT AND JACKSON STATE! was the
slogan that resonated through the student movement in the 70’s and 80’s. Folks
that were active in 1970 will, to this day, automatically respond to mention of
Kent State by saying “and Jackson State.” Thus, the struggle for memory,
and against the tendency of the fiercest of people’s battles to be crammed down
the Great American Memory Hole, has also helped keep the memory of the Jackson
killings alive far beyond the borders of the campus itself.

Activists in the May 4 movement at Kent have
always worked to maintain ties with Jackson State. For years until his untimely
death earlier this decade, Gene Young represented Jackson at Kent State every
year and was a cherished figure in the community there.

Still, the greater attention to Kent in memory and in history as it is taught
and written in this white supremacist country is obvious. It clearly rankles
many of the veterans at Jackson State. Several made a point of complaining that
the protest at Jackson is too often described as an anti-war protest and not primarily
as a protest against the multi-faceted racism directed at Black students in the
capital of Mississippi in 1970.

6. It is only natural that the focus on Kent (and, always, Jackson)
in the May 4 commemorations carries with it a certain built-in narrowness.
While the killings at Kent kicked the national student strike into overdrive,
it was already the largest and most powerful student protest in the history of
the country.

The thing about Kent is that the administration closed the
campus up tight on the afternoon of May 4 and ordered everyone to leave. From
the standpoint of Kent, the May '70 story pretty much ends here, but those of
us who were around during that fateful month know this was only part of the
story. The truncation of the narrative can be seen clearly in the May 4
Visitor’s Center. The Kent-centrism is reflected in the three parts of the
museum. The build-up section presents a broad picture of the 60’s and the
tectonic shifts in politics, society and culture that that gave rise to the
earthquake that was May 1970. The central section is the film about the events
of that day. The third part is heavily focused on various responses to the Kent
killings, with some attention to Jackson State.

The fact that the movement went on to greater heights, more
militant battles, and striking accomplishments is absent. I spoke with two paid
staffers, neither of whom knew about the police killings of six young Black men
in Augusta, Georgia between the shootings in Kent and Jackson, or about the
“hard hat riots,” savage attacks on protestors by union construction workers,
organized in conjunction with President Nixon’s White House.

This is baked into the long struggle at Kent and it is not
the particular responsibility of activists there to correct it. That falls
rather to veterans of all the battles of May 1970: step up, dredge up the
memories and spread the lessons, as folks have been doing at Kent and Jackson
all these years.

7. There were some intriguing parallels at the
two events.

Both sets of May 1970 veterans emphasized the organized nature of the murderous
attacks—at Kent, the National Guard unit wheeling, kneeling and firing in
unison into the unarmed students, and at Jackson the way the po-po marched in
order up Lynch Street before turning to fire on the students.

Similarly, some people at both campuses seem driven to deny
that the burning of the ROTC buildings there were the work of campus protesters.
At Kent, the conspiracy-minded attribute not only the May 2 fire but also the
cutting of firehoses to prevent it being extinguished to the work of provocateurs
directed by the feds. At Jackson, the tendency is to blame vandalism by “the corner
boys,” young Black men who hung out in the neighborhood of the campus. Well,
maybe. But let’s not forget that 30 ROTC buildings developed problems which
compromised their structural integrity, shall we say, during the first week of
May 1970. Thirty. I know for a fact that some were not the work of provocateurs
or “outside elements.”

We have two books to look forward to, both headed for
publication. Tom Grace, wounded on May 4 and now a professor in Buffalo, will add
his analysis to the considerable body of works on Kent State. The absence of a
comparable shelf full of books dealing with Jackson State is to be improved by
Dr. Nancy Bristow of the University of Puget Sound, who is finalizing a definitive
study.

Best of all is a little script flip. At Jackson State, a
white prof, Dr. Robert Luckett of the History Department, evidently played an
important role in organizing the program. At Kent the faculty adviser of the student
May 4 Task Force for more than a decade is a lecturer in the Department of
Pan-African Studies, Idris Kabir Syed, who also acts as advise

r to Black United
Students there. Sweet, hunh?

8. Finally, I want to issue a challenge to the Kent State
May 4 Family and to others, old school veterans and new activists alike, who
hold the memory of the events of May ’70 in their hearts. A Venn diagram of the
attendees at the Kent and Jackson observations this year would show the circles
intersecting at one point. Me. That ain’t right. If there is a 46th
anniversary celebration at Jackson State next year, I hope you will join me
there.

March 20, 2015

When I saw, last week, a news bulletin announcing that
two cops had just been shot in Ferguson, MO at the end of a demonstration, I
thought, “Fuck. This could get really ugly, really fast.”

My fears have not been borne out, I am happy to admit. The
cops both went home after a day or two in the hospital. The dude arrested for
doing the shooting, Jeffrey Williams, reportedly said, and there’s other
evidence, that he wasn’t even aiming at the police.

Still I was a bit puzzled by the low-key approach to the
whole thing taken by the mainstream media and even moreso by the rather limited
stir it caused in the fairly revolutionary corner of Facespace where I spend
too much time.

Even as I noticed this, I was reflecting on some lessons
from the incident, lessons that folks may have missed because there was
relatively little attention paid.

The Ferguson Movement Continues to Amaze and Inspire

Most of all, it showed how astounding the movement in St. Louis has become.
Even as it sparked the first real nationwide, as opposed to localized, movement
against racist police violence ever in this country and triggered the reawakening
of the Black Liberation Movement, it has remained the epicenter of the
struggle, despite murders even more shocking than that of Mike Brown, like
those of Akai Gurley in New York City and Tamir Rice in Cleveland.

Consider the March 12 protest which the gunfire ended. It was the
community seizing on important victories it had just won and pressing the
offensive. With the damning US Department of Justice report on racism in the
St. Louis county police and court system, several perpetrators were fired or
resigned, including a judge. That very day, the chief of the Ferguson PD
resigned.

In the evening, 500 people gathered at Ferguson Police
Department headquarters, where most of the protests take place, facing off
against a couple hundred battle-dressed cops. They were celebrating by demanding
the resignation of Ferguson Mayor James Knowles as well.

Reports indicate there were disagreements, sometime heated,
among the protesters over tactics, particularly blocking traffic on South
Florissant, the main drag in front of the cop shop. Some of it evidently arose
when the core who have been keeping the protests alive month after month tried
to school newbies and irregulars who came out for this action in how the
struggle has been built and conducted,

(I saw this dynamic myself acted out when I was among the
couple thousand folk from around the country who answered the call to #FergusonOctober
last fall. The way in which the organizers and the marshals on that weekend
recognized and provided productive outlets for young militants, locals and
visitors alike, to challenge the system and the police in non-approved ways without threatening the united front that had been built for the demo was
a marvel of political astuteness.)

The fifty or so protesters who were left on the scene at midnight
when the shots rang out were themselves terrified. And well they might have
been. With two cops down and many others with weapons at the ready, a massacre could
have easily resulted.

Despite this, the protesters returned the next night, 50
strong, around the norm for the frequent protests over the winter, to

December 6, 2014

I have written elsewhere in praise of the heroism of the
people of Ferguson and, more broadly, St. Louis. In a few short months, the
ripple effect from their protests have created what is shaping up to be a new
historical moment in this country.

I have been half-joking for a while now that I have a second
hero, the weedy tech who nervously approached his boss and
said, "Mr. Jobs, sir, you know we could put a video camera in our iPhones and charge an extra seventy bucks or so for them. People would take
videos of their sweethearts and their pets and their kids' school play and then
they'd send them around! What do you think?"

Today, there's been an enormous amount of commentary, online
and in the press, on the national wave of demonstrations protesting the Staten
Island Grand Jury process that walked killer cop Daniel Pantaleo. It is
crystal-clear that that much of the outrage is fueled by the readily available cell phone video shot by Ramsey Orta as his friend Eric Garner was choked to death
by police.

There is no way to deny or spin what you are seeing. And what you are hearing: "I can't breathe, I can't
breathe, I can't breathe…"

So instead of my mythical nerd, I decided to see if I could
find out who my hero really is. Credit where credit is due. An hour or so spent
with Comrade Google has given me some good candidates at least. Dr. Eric Fossum
headed the NASA team that developed the CMOS ASP, the camera-on-a-chip in the
early '90s. A gent named Kazumi Saburi developed the first peer–to-peer
video-sharing phone for Kyocera, a Japanese firm in 1997. Doubtless there were
others. J-Phone, a Kyocera rival, produced the first commercially successful
phone with still and video capability in 2002.

(Perhaps I ought to do some research on the originators of commercially available cloud computing too. Recent court rulings, even by the Roberts Supreme Court, have declared that citizens have the right to videotape police officers in the performance of their duties, that the contents of their cellphones cannot be inspected without a warrant and the police are completely prohibited from erasing any content on phones they have confiscated. This has been a boon to CopWatch programs. The Cloud enters into it because the po-po have repeatedly ignored these rulings. But if a video is automatically uploaded to the Cloud in real time, as in this very recent case, the record of police violence is preserved.)Should any Alpha Geek deeply versed in this history wants to
school me, I welcome corrections or additions. And meanwhile, I sincerely thank
Dr. Fossum and Kazumi Saburi, their coworkers and others laboring in the dark
satanic mills of the cellphone industry for letting us see, with our own eyes,
what happened to Eric Garner.